Accounting for charities and not-for-profits

When Dan Garrigan, Finance Director with Merchant Taylors’ Company, decided it was time to upgrade from Sage 200, he knew their new finance system had to be in the Cloud.

"Sage 200 was coming to its end-of-life and the reporting was clunky. If we were going to change finance system we definitely wanted it to be Cloud-based, rather than incurring server costs."

Dan undertook a broad search of the accounting software marketplace. He looked at both large ERP systems, such as NetSuite and Sage Intacct, and smaller out-of-the-box software, such as Xero.

 AccountsIQ ticks all the boxes

"We fell between two stalls. Our finance needs are more complex than the functionality we found in the out-of-the-box systems, like Xero. But it was hard to justify the cost of something like Netsuite."

After joining a couple of AccountsIQ’s webinars and demos, Dan thought: ‘that ticks all the boxes’.

 A painless change   

Dan and his team found switching to AccountsIQ painless. Here’s his advice if you’re thinking of embarking on a similar project:

1) Allow time for pre-implementation work

Dan’s team thought ahead about the design of their Chart of Accounts. They then refined this with the AccountsIQ team who shared their experience of what had worked with other customers. As Dan says:

“The design of your Chart of Accounts is the big thing to get right. Everything else then follows. The time spent on this really paid off for us. We’ve got a design we’re happy with and meets all our needs.”

Watch our ‘How healthy is your Chart of Accounts?’ webinar.

2) Be flexible

The ideas you have at the start of your project might not carry through to implementation. That’s not a problem. As Dan explains:

With AccountsIQ, you get Sandbox test entities. This is great because you can play around with the software before you go-live and see what things look like and how it all works.

3) Invest in team training

Dan strongly recommends training your team, both in the run up to implementation and in the first two months post go-live. As he says:

"AccountsIQ are extremely good at this. We used the AIQ Academy and we had bespoke online training sessions with Daryl. They were all invaluable. We’ve kept the recordings and the team refer back when they need a refresher on features they don’t use regularly."

Find out more about how AccountsIQ can help your finance team

AccountsIQ’s charity accounting software is trusted by over 100 charity and not-for-profit finance teams. You can read their stories here.

To find out more talk to one of our accounting experts.  

The Diocese of Arundel and Brighton’s finances are transformed by consolidated Cloud accounting

In 2018, The Diocese of Arundel and Brighton began a digital finance transformation initiative with AccountsIQ. It was a highly ambitious project involving complex workflow automations. There were also multiple stakeholders, including around 70, mainly volunteer, users with varying levels of accounting and IT experience.

The Diocese had been using a stand-alone finance system, called Finance Co-ordinator. “It had a good Chart of Accounts,” Sarah recalls. “But no consolidation function. At the end of the year, each parish would send in their activity and finance would re-key the transactions.”

These manual processes were time consuming and error prone. More importantly, the only management information the Diocese had was a P&L and balance sheet for each parish. “There was no granularity,” says Sarah, “the old system didn’t give us the insight we needed at individual parish level.”  

In search of a more advanced cloud system, Sarah talked to AccountsIQ’s CEO, Tony Connolly, and the finance team from the Archdiocese of Dublin, who were already an AccountsIQ customer.  

“AccountsIQ is Cloud-based, so I can access the parish books and see what’s going on from the centre.” 

Sarah Kilmartin, COO, The Catholic Diocese of Arundel and Brighton.

Moving to AccountsIQ enables automated, efficient processes  

The Diocese of Arundel and Brighton chose AccountsIQ because they wanted to be able to share a single platform with their parishes. Their objective was to automate as much of their manual finance processing as possible.

Digital cash collection is an example of an effective process that AccountsIQ created specifically for the Diocese.  Income from each church is entered on an online cash collection sheet, which updates directly into AccountsIQ. This means income is recognised directly on entry and can be consolidated across all parishes. Crucially, Sarah’s team didn’t simply replicate their previous, paper-based cash collection process into AccountsIQ.

“We combined a number of processes,” explains Sarah. “Now, it’s quick, easy, and error proof with no re-keying, sending emails or putting things in the post. I also look after a small parish as a volunteer and the monthly bank rec takes less than 15 minutes.

Sarah also likes the useability of AccountsIQ, “The most useful feature for me as COO is having all my parishes laid out in a list. I can click down to the transaction level detail very easily. I also have full trust in the completeness and accuracy of the data being captured; it accounts for every penny that goes through the bank.”

Granular reporting is revolutionising the church finance role

The Diocese is using AccountsIQ extensively for analysis and reporting.  Each parish has its own database in AccountsIQ, and the BI coding structure enables the Diocese to run reports for each church, fund, site or central office department.   

“This multi-dimensional reporting is perfect for our setting. It has revolutionised our potential to do our job here in the centre. That is to stand over these charitable funds and know exactly what’s going on with the funds of each charity.

“I find the management reports useful and look at them all the time. For example, when a new priest comes to a parish I can run through the P&L very easily. Previously, we didn’t have this level of information.”

Digital transformation is an on-going collaboration

After several years on the platform, AccountsIQ continues to work well for the Diocese. Sarah reports that they hit their year-end deadlines, with all parish accounts reconciled within two months. “Initially, we needed support to roll out the project,” she recalls. “But our users are now confident using the system.”

Looking back, Sarah describes this complex digital transformation project as a creative, on-going collaboration between the Diocese and the AccountsIQ team. “There are still things we plan to do,” she says. “For example, contactless payments have become mainstream since we started with AccountsIQ, and we need to find a solution that works for us. That said, whenever we bring problems to AccountsIQ, they understand them and help us sort them.”

“AccountsIQ is a product I would happily recommend to others. It has revolutionised how we do our job.”

Sarah Kilmartin, COO, The Catholic Diocese of Arundel and Brighton

Summing-up, Sarah concludes that, now they have everyone working on one central Cloud accounting platform, they would never go back.

“We have fewer finance staff now, but they are more skilled. Our people costs may not have gone down, but the quality of what we know has gone up. We would certainly never go back to having 80+ desktop systems. Ultimately, AccountsIQ is a product I would happily recommend to others.”

Learn more

Discover how AccountsIQ's accounting software for charities solves the often complex accounting challenges of over 100 not for profits such as Humentum. 

Call us on +44 (0)203 598 7350 or email us to set up a free consultation/demo.

Alongside their commitment to supporting a better life for everyone affected by epilepsy, national charity Epilepsy Action must contend with some complex financial management challenges. Multiple sources of income, stringent controls over spending and restricted fund requirements, to name a few. That’s before we throw the cost-of-living crisis and an increasingly difficult fundraising environment into the mix.

Undaunted by such challenges, Tony Spinks, Director of Corporate Services with Epilepsy Action, decided to re-assess the systems and processes that would enable the charity to thrive no matter what. His #1 priority was the need to improve management reporting. In particular, he wanted real-time data to make better, quicker decisions about how they allocate resources. 

“We need to be absolutely on top of our financial position. We need complete visibility of what income and expenditure we have coming down the line to make the best decisions for the people who rely on our services. We were using Sage50; it was functional but wasn’t giving us the next level of management reporting we needed.”

Epilepsy Action needed a mid-market accounting solution

With lots of options on the market, choosing a new finance system can be mind boggling. As Tony recognised, Sage 50 is good for start-ups. But Epilepsy Action is a medium-sized organisation with around 70 staff, and they needed the next step up. However, when Tony looked at the Microsoft products and NetSuite, he concluded, “we didn’t need anywhere near that.”

When an invite to an AccountsIQ demo webinar landed in Tony’s in-box, he took 30 minutes out of his day to watch.

“I thought ‘this could be the answer to my problem’. I got in touch and started the journey. The more I saw of the system, the more I was convinced AccountsIQ was what we needed.”

Changing finance system is not as scary as many people think

Epilepsy Action went live with AccountsIQ on 1 January 2023. In the run-up to go-live, Tony and his team structured their training around the AIQ Academy online learning platform. To make it more effective and enjoyable, they introduced a practical, team-based approach to the training.

“The Academy videos are great, but we learn best by doing. We sat down as a team for an hour every Friday to put what we’d learnt into practice. For example, we’d watch the video about how to approve purchase invoices and then go and actually do it. AccountsIQ provide a test environment so it doesn’t matter if you make a mistake, you’re not messing with live data, and you can’t break it.”

Once they’d got to grips with the extra coding functionality that AccountsIQ provides, Tony and his team found the rest of the process of changing finance system easy.

“AccountsIQ is easy to use and our implementation consultant, Helen, was great. Her catchphrase was ‘we’ll just get it done!’ I found the whole process really easy. It’s not as scary as people make out.”

Three months down the line and all the transactional processes are running smoothly. The team are already noticing some significant time saving, particularly around the purchasing processes which used to be very manual. Now, they’re looking at where they can make even more efficiency gains.

“Automating processes is already saving us a huge chunk of time but there’s lots more time saving to come. I’ve got the OData connector working and I’m building the reporting templates. It’s this combination of time saving and financial visibility that will allow us to do more data analysis and really add value to our organisation. Everything I wanted is starting to happen.”